Religion

October 17, 2014

But he chooses to bridge the gap in a more significant, personal way. He chooses out of many nations one people and in the years of their history discloses - progressively from Abraham and Moses on, but most specifically in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Hosea - his holiness, his desire for human beings, his longstanding, faithful love for his rational creatures.

And yet this is not enough...

Excerpt from A TRAVELER TOWARD THE DAWN (The Spiritual Journal of John Eagan, SJ)

October 15, 2014

...Marty chooses for our consideration one of the great currents of scripture: Jesus, the supreme revelation of the Father. The insights I gain this week become central categories for my future thinking and teaching and preaching. Marty moved in the following vein:

God in Himself is the transcendental one. As such he exceeds and explodes all our human thought categories. No human mind can capture Him. He who is light in himself is darkness for the human mind.

How, then, can he communicate himself to fleshbound human beings in a way calculated to grasp us and grip us and lift us up into a lifegiving personal relationship with him?

The first way God chooses to bridge the gap is creation. He creates our universe, the bewildering variety of touchable, seeable, hearable, palpable beings, so that we can stand before star-studded heavens, before sunrise and sunset glories, before Yosemite and Coldwater, the might of the Pacific in storm, before the complexity of atom and DNA and the human body, and know something of that Maker: his majesty, his intelligence, his beauty, his power. In a real sense, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God." Creation is the first preaching of the good news. The universe is truly a sacramental universe, a sign disclosing Him. He is the radical secret at the heart of the universe. And so it has been for me in my own experience.

But he chooses to bridge the gap in a more significant, personal way...

A TRAVELER TOWARD THE DAWN, The Spiritual Journal of John Eagan, S.J. (1990 Loyola University Press) page 24

October 01, 2014

I am re-reading Marilynne Robinson's essay on Psalm Eight in her book THE DEATH OF ADAM (Essays on Modern Thought).

"One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho, where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection. I was a young child with neither the habit nor the expectation of understanding, as the word is normally used, most of what went on around me. Yet I remember that sermon, and I believe in some degree I took its meaning.

As an older child in another church and town, on no specific occasion, I heard the Eighth Psalm read, and kept for myself a few words from it, because they heartened certain intuitions of mine - 'When I consider thy heavens, the work of they fingers, the moon and the stars...What is man, that thou art mindful of him? the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou has made him a little lower than the angels..." I quote the King James Version because those were the words I heard and remembered. The thought never entered my mind that the language could be taken to exclude me, perhaps because my experience of it was the religious one, of words in some exceptional sense addressed precisely to me."

Who is to know what is going on in a child's mind as she sits swinging her legs in church on a Sunday morning. These two accounts describe...what do they describe? I am cautious to use 'religious language' here because as I read these two accounts of her memories as a child, I am struck by the great mystery of the words in Psalm 8..."What is man that thou art mindful of him?..."

September 07, 2014

"The families of both my parents settled and established themselves in the northern mountains, where there is a special sweetness in the light and grace in the vegetation, and as well a particular tenderness in the contact of light and vegetation. We used to hunt for wild strawberries in places in the woods where there had once been fires. These meadows, which for decades or centuries would hardly have felt more sunlight than the floor of the sea, were avid for it. Because of the altitude, or the damp, or the kind of grass that grew in such places, they were radiant, smoldering, gold with transparency, accepting light altogether. Thousands of florets for which I would never learn names, so tiny even a child had to kneel to see them at all, squandered intricacy and opulence on avid little bees, the bees cherished, the flowers cherished, the light cherished, visibly, audibly, palpably...

To find in the sober woods these little Orients of delectation was like hearing a tale of opulent grace poured out on a modest need or of miracle astonishing despair, a parable brilliant with strangeness, cryptic with wisdom, disturbing as a tender intention full of the frightening mercy of foreknowledge. God will wipe away all tears, the dead will rise, meant to me then, Little girl, you will mourn and you will die. Perhaps that was some great part of the difference I felt between the world and myself, that while it was a thousand ways true that it knew me as I could not know myself - my old relatives remembered people with my voice or my eyes and how they lived and how their lives ended - I hoarded the notion of this singular self in this singular moment, as if such things could exist, and shrugged away intention and anticipation and cherishing, knowing they meant that even I never was my own."

August 27, 2014

August 12, 2014

A prophet? Yes, I tell you more than a prophet. Truly I tell you, among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

August 11, 2014

August 01, 2014

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or, if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him.

July 28, 2014

...For compassion means to build a bridge to others without knowing whether they want to be reached. Your brother or sister might be so embittered that he or she doesn't expect anything from you. Then your compassion stirs up emnity, and it is difficult not to become sour yourself and say, "You see what I told you, it doesn't work anyhow."

And yet, compassion is possible when it is rooted in prayer. For in prayer, you do not depend upon your own strength or on the good will of another, but only upon your trust in God. That is why prayer makes you free to live a compassionate life even when it does not evoke a grateful response or bring immediate reward.